Salt Skin
She squinted into the glinting sunlight shimmering off the faces of a multitude of gently whipped little waves, the Balearic sea’s blinding rebuff to the advances of a pressing afternoon sun.
Before her, dark earthen-hued bodies of beached adults spotted the sands. Each held in heat’s dry stupor just where they’d collapsed, she mused to herself, surely soon to be baked into wrinkled little crisps and blown away on the next strong gust.
Her arm had a pink mark where her head had just rested and in an impulse, she licked her skin there. The small hairs against her tongue, the toasted warmth, and taste of salt were a sensory cocktail that hailed a brief array of ghosted recollections. A collective of many previous summers flashed through her mind, neurons running sprints into the foggy territory of memory permanently buried and back again with arms empty but lit with fresh tales of the treasure obscured there, just beyond reach.
Her hipbone jabbed into the rock, the thin towel doing little to act as cushion. As with most minor discomforts once it had her attention it was a relentless distraction from the previous moment’s relaxation. The crisp sounds of receding wavelets washing through a rainbow of tiny pebbles sang of cool liquid reprieve and she languidly pulled herself to her feet.
There are moments where idleness feels delicious, even addicting, when the mind slips into a rhythm of content, and breath meets only moment. Such moments are so far from the rule of busyness and the necessity for busyness that the hectic world seems only a faraway dream. A dream from which she’d temporarily awakened into lazy sanity.
Escape in its purest form is merely. a transcendence of consciousness, alighting from one stream of thought to the next until it meet such pleasure of sense or distraction that it lingers and forgets its origins.
Gingerly wading into the sea, she was precisely aware of where her palms and fingers met the water, cutting elements. She tested the rocks and pebbles for footing, without hurry. she had all day to take each step. Squinting into the beaming glare before her, an intake and plunge released the heat trapped under her skin, and just like that, suddenly the world was sharp again, all senses snapped to attention.
She stood now looking at the shore, water rolling off her body and lapping at her waist. All before her was painted in brilliantly luquid hues and she feasted on it as one savors sweetness on the tongue.
Children played in the gentle surf and scoured the rocks with avid and meticulous eye for treasures their elders had long ago forgotten the worth of. Their squeals and attentiveness to the beauty all around them played on her soul a song, a distant tune harkening back to a time of wonder. Before the notes could take form it faded like a dream fades upon awakening. It left a mischievous urge behind, the appetite for adventure. The need to taste charged winds, to touch rock and earth, and seize that great ungraspable expanse of the unknowable that the adult eye has trained itself not to see.
It is the wisdom of children that they revel upon the earth with such abandon and drink of life‘s delight in great gulps. What fools, we who wander so far from happiness.
Author: Lane Oliveri
